Cheese! It’s just the best. Formaggio Kitchen, the cheesemonger near our apartment in Cambridge, has helped us better appreciate the diversity of textures and flavors that people have figured out how to coax out of microbial colonies when added to milk. As far as fermented products, though, cheese is one of the more difficult ones to make at home.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Hard cheeses like cheddar do require long aging processes and extra ingredients like the enzymes in rennet to move the fermentation process along. In the end, though, cheese is just the solid parts of milk, the proteins and fat that are called the curds, pressed and aged over some period of time.
We at Craft & Process will probably attempt and share our experiences with more complicated cheese-making at some point. For now, though, we wanted to learn about the simplest way to make a cheese in our kitchen. And that cheese? Paneer.
You probably know paneer as a common component of dishes in Indian cooking It’s simple, with just two ingredients. While it’s somewhat flavorful on its own, it mostly picks up the aromas and spices in whatever dish it is cooked.
Paneer is a young cheese, meaning that it’s not aged. That results in a soft, pillowy cheese with a consistency akin to tofu. How soft or firm it ends up is really up to you during the process.
You’ll heat up milk to a boil, then add vinegar. This addition of acid to the more basic milk will cause the milk to curdle, meaning the proteins and fats will separate in blobs out from the liquid parts of the milk, called the whey.
Once this separation occurs, you’ll drain the liquid off, then wrap the remaining curds and press them to get rid of any additional whey. How long you press the curds impacts how soft your cheese will be: press them for just a minute or even avoid the pressing altogether and you’ll have soft, moist curds, while a longer pressing will result in the more firm, sliceable patty that we’re aiming for here.
We used cheesecloth for the wrapping, as it allows the whey to drain effectively while still holding the curds together. It’s a versatile tool in the kitchen that’s useful to have on hand for various filtering or pressing processes, and you can find it at most grocery stores. We also use it to strain yogurt and to make cultured butter (post coming soon!).
Paneer
Makes 1 patty 4 inches in diameter and 1 inch thick
Ingredients
- 2 quarts of whole milk
- 3 tablespoons of white vinegar
Recipe
- Cutting or folding the cheesecloth, make a three or four layer thick square of cheesecloth and place into a colander in your sink. The square should be large enough that you can wrap up a thick disk of cheese curds that is about 3 ½ inches across.
- Bring the milk just to a boil in a saucepan.
- As soon as the milk boils, turn the heat to low and add the vinegar.
- Start stirring slowly. The milk will curdle as you stir, separating into clumps of curds. Keep stirring until it seems like things aren’t changing anymore, around 2 minutes.
- Pour the pan into the cheesecloth and colander. The curds will stay in the cheesecloth while the whey drains.
- Set up your pressing station, with something to collect the whey at the bottom (like a sheet pan), two cutting boards (to place above and below the cheese), and something heavy on top (like a cast iron pan). To keep things draining more effectively, you can tilt the cutting board.
- Gather the corners of the cheesecloth and spin the bundle to tighten the curds into a ball. Fold the twisted end of the bundle down and put the ball into your pressing station on the lower cutting board. Put the other cutting board and weight on top.
- Wait 5 minutes as the cheese is pressed.
- Unwrap the paneer, slice, and serve or store in the fridge for up to 2 days.
Serve the paneer as part of a cheese plate or as the protein in other Indian dishes or salads!
